Month: October 2013

Recently, I’ve been meeting with successful PMs to learn more about the role and skills required for this position. Madhu Prabaker, a Product Manager at Yelp was kind enough to share the resources below with me, which I felt was an awesome guide for anyone interested in learning more about Product Management.

What is Product Management?

Product management isn’t a role or a function, it’s a set of skills. Those skills help remove obstacles and grease the wheels so that the functional experts can do their jobs best. Product management also balances the needs of users, the business and the team and makes the difficult tradeoffs needed to keep pressing ahead. In that way, Product Managers are very similar to CEOs. Very few would argue that a company doesn’t need a CEO. Product managers are simply CEOs of their products. http://www.instigatorblog.com/the-role-of-product-managers/2012/06/08/

Product Management as Just Three Responsibilities

What game are we playing, and how do we keep score? This line sums up the responsibility of Product Strategy. Being able to understand the objectives of implemented features is important, and so is measuring whether they are effective as well. ttp://blog.adamnash.com/2011/12/16/be-a-great-product-leader/

Metrics for a PM

Metrics allow PMs to measure the results of new features and products. This Quora article helps dissect some of the basic metrics important to a PM. http://qr.ae/TWUYN

What does a top 1% PM do well?

The top 10% of product managers excel at a few of these things. The top 1% excel at most or all of them: Think big, communicate, simplify, prioritize, forecast and measure, Execute, understand technical trade-offs, understand good design, and write effective copy. http://qr.ae/TWUN5

As I apply for different technical positions, I thought it’d be relevant to show a bit of my self-taught design experience. I don’t claim to be an expert, but greatly enjoy design, tinkering in illustrator, and trying to create clean UI’s for people to use. If I could do it over, I would have studied CS or Graphic Design instead of Finance. in Feel free to contact me at sing.drew at gmail dot com if you have any questions. Most recent work displayed first (you can see if I’ve improved with time).

In 14 days, I built StayTraders with 1 other Rails Dev. Because of our sprint time crunch and having to work on back-end as well, I didn’t get to polish the product as much as I would have liked (smaller pic sizes for people, cleaner profile designs, simplified navigation). Still proud though of the usable product and features we were able to pump out.

2012 – Recess Vibe

With my evenings and weekends, I worked on an MVP with 2 other Rails Dev. My role was strictly design, haml, and sass. Recess Vibe isn’t up anymore, but here’s a home page I designed. Our goal was to bring together 18-24 year olds in Sydney with a social booking platform that displayed who has booked via fb connect. I enjoyed trying to design a standout nav bar, while still following basic nav bar principles.

2010 – Hangchillparty

My first attempts at product design. I designed the UI, graphics and hacked the html and css. My goal was to provide the fewest features possible to allow for a simple, usable interface (You can view our previous iteration three months beforehand here, which shows the product design only had room to get better).